MIAMI BEACH — Crypto wallets are being redesigned to serve AI agents, executives from Trust Wallet and Mesh said Thursday at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami, as companies scramble to give autonomous software a way to hold value, prove identity and transact on-chain.
The push responds to what Mesh CTO Arjun Mukherjee called the “cold-start” problem: an AI agent can’t act until it has a funded wallet. “An agent can’t do anything until it has a wallet funded,” he said. “It’s very difficult for the agent to act until it has a wallet to do something, and it has value to transact with. And suddenly, enter crypto. Crypto has found its kind of niche, its killer app.”
Mesh, which builds a connectivity layer across exchanges, wallets, smart contracts and decentralized exchanges, launched Smart Funding — a routing product that moves payments across chains, networks, accounts and tokens to support both human users and autonomous agents. The idea is to make it seamless for agents to access on-chain funds and execute payments regardless of network or token.
Trust Wallet is taking a two-track approach, CEO Felix Fan said. On the consumer side, agents are being integrated as non-custodial copilots: they help users navigate on-chain features and speed up tasks, but users retain key control and must consent to every step. “Users always hold the keys and all these permissions. Every single step, they need to give consent,” Fan said.
On the developer side, Trust Wallet is more permissive. The firm recently released an agent kit that allows agents to autonomously execute trades, transfers and other on-chain actions. It is also adopting EIP-8004, an Ethereum proposal intended to give agents on-chain identities and credit-style scores — tools that could let agents build reputation and access services without centralized intermediaries. “On the crypto app side, we’re enabling humans to have superpowers with AI, whereas on the developer side, we are enabling agents to do something like humans,” Fan said.
Liability and accountability remain front of mind. Mukherjee warned against importing traditional finance’s frictions into agent payments and stressed that AI should augment—not replace—human judgment. He said responsibility for an agent’s actions should rest with the institution that deploys it.
Both executives expect major AI labs to roll out their own wallets. Fan pointed to X’s push around X Money and predicted products from Grok and Claude teams could enable on-chain activity “maybe just tomorrow.” Mukherjee said Mesh will stay agnostic to wallets, networks and tokens: “If there’s Web3-based e-commerce on any network, on any token, and any connected funds, we all win.”
The conversation highlights a fast-evolving corner of Web3: wallets are no longer just key storage tools but infrastructure being rebuilt to support a new class of autonomous economic actors — and the companies that enable them.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
